The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group works to help people whose rights have been violated and investigates cases involving such abuse, as well as assessing the overall human rights situation in Ukraine. The Group also seeks to develop awareness of human rights issues through public events and its various publications

The Institute for Mass Information reports that on July 19 Kremlin-backed militants detained 10 foreign journalists covering the shooting down, almost certainly by militants, of the Malaysian plane and the attempts to recover the bodies. As of July 20, IMI has ascertained, all journalists have been released.

The ten included journalists from British, Swedish and Russian media who were waiting outside one of the morgues in Donetsk and trying to establish whether the bodies of those killed in the disaster had been brought there.

They were detained by militants from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic supposedly because they didn’t have ‘accreditation from Strelkov” as well as ‘DPR accreditation’.

Igor Strelkov [real name – Girkin] is the Russian military commander who calls himself the DPR ‘defence minister’. Among the evidence incriminating the militants of responsibility for the downing of the Malaysian airline was a report on his VKontakte social network page. Screenshots of this and other material since removed from the Russian media and social networks where the militants boasted of having shot down – what they thought to be – another Ukrainian military transport plane can be found here.

Kevin Bishop from the BBC talks about this and other experiences on Twitter here